Full Description
The past decade has seen a vast expansion of resilience pedagogies, policies, and products in public education, from the Every Student Succeeds Act to social and emotional learning to grit. Educational apps, avatars, and games as well as behaviorist techniques, meditation programs, and biometric devices claim to teach resilience to adverse social conditions while new cyber schools, education brokers, global democracy promotion companies, and dropout recovery firms promise schools resilience to disaster and disruption. The Disaster of Resilience shows how resilience discourse is interwoven with the new digital directions of educational privatization. Saltman argues that resilience has provided the justification for new educational profiteering, creating a climate which individualizes collective responsibilities, depoliticizes and dehistoricizes knowledge and curriculum, and falsely grounds its politics in a mashup of pseudoscience and human capital theory. He argues that we must replace resilience discourse with pedagogies and curriculum that allow students not only to endure the intolerable conditions they find themselves in, but to see beyond those conditions and to act collectively on the social, economic, and racial injustices that created them.
Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Resilience and Disaster
1. Microschools, UberEd and the Dropout Recovery Industry
2. From Venture Philanthropy to Digital Privatization: New Schools Venture Fund, Leap Innovations and the Selling of Digital Student Resilience
3. Democracy International, Inc.: Selling Resilience and Education in the Global Influence Peddling Industry
4. Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, Grit, and Biometrics: The Denial of Educational Politics and Racial Politics
5. Student Resilience, Social Emotional Learning, Testing as Teaching, and the Displacement of Intellectual Traditions
Conclusion: From the Disaster of Resilience to Becoming Resilient to Resilience
References
Index
